Success #1

10112009

A brief summary of yesterday’s activities:

The day started off a bit rocky. I made a mistake in both calibrating the navigation instruments and updating the calibration file which resulted in the navigation being off by about 10%. We brought ENDURANCE back, figured out the problem, recharged a bit, reset the navigation, and sent it back out with about a 4 hour delay.

But then everything ran smoothly. ENDURANCE successfully performed 19 sonde drops over a 2.4 km course, including a lot of photos of the bottom of Lake Bonney along the north shore which were of great interest to John Priscu, one of the co-investigators on the project who has been doing research at Lake Bonney for over 20 years. These points represent about 20% of the primary data we want to capture. Of course, we did get the easiest points, so future days will have to be slightly less productive, though not less exciting.

At my station in the 'bothouse watching some of the first images of the bottom of Lake Bonney from this year come in. On the monitor on the upper right is an image from the downward-looking camera on the sonde showing some interesting red streaking in the bottom sediments.

One of the images from the sonde camera showing some biological growths on the bottom of Lake Bonney. The white spot on the right is from the light on the sonde.

In the evening, we brought back one of our projectors and celebrated with a showing of The Big Lebowski back at Lake Bonney Camp.